In the savage comedy “God of Carnage,” a living room becomes a lion’s den for a quartet of mutually abusive New Yorkers.

But to Rick Seer, who is directing Yasmina Reza’s celebrated play for the Old Globe Theatre, the bickering among the four parents who make up its characters could just about be transplanted from this upscale Brooklyn apartment straight to our nation’s halls of power.

“I think the play is actually a very clever sort of political farce,” says Seer, whose staging of the Tony Award-winning work is its San Diego premiere. “Even though it’s not overtly political, I think it is less about parents acting badly, which it’s often portrayed as, and more about the kind of chaos we currently are having to put up with politically. In this country, and around the world, for that matter.”

Reza’s play, originally written in French (its English translation is by Christopher Hampton), premiered in Switzerland six years ago, hit London’s West End in 2008 and landed on Broadway in 2009.

It centers on two sets of parents who meet to discuss a troubling incident: The couples’ sons have gotten into a playground altercation, and one has knocked out two of the other’s teeth.

While the grown-ups ostensibly have gathered to discuss the matter rationally and make some peace, the encounter soon devolves into a wordier version of a schoolyard brawl. Feelings are trampled, relationships are frayed and, in one case of a character with a little nausea problem, much more is spewed than simply words. (Rest assured, the purging is simulated.)

“This is about four people, none of whom are willing to take responsibility,” Seer says. “And they’re all accusing the other side of being wrong — loudly and sometimes ridiculously.

“If you look at what’s going on in our own Congress, or in Europe — which is where (Reza) wrote it originally — society has broken down, our ability to communicate with each other has broken down. And this family argument is a microcosm of all of that.

“I think that’s what (Reza is) trying to say, and I think that’s where it’s a kind of wonderful, absurdist political farce.”

Symbolic comedy

Comedy or no, “God of Carnage” is a play with a reputation for putting actors through the wringer. The original Broadway cast featured Jeff Daniels, Marcia Gay Harden, James Gandolfini and Hope Davis; director Roman Polanski’s movie adaptation, “Carnage,” came out last year with Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz as the leads.

The local production (which is one of many going up around the country and world of late) brings in four actors with both Broadway and previous Globe credits. Three of them also happen to be graduates of the joint Old Globe/University of San Diego graduate acting program, which Seer directs.

Erika Rolfsrud (Broadway’s “The Coast of Utopia”) plays Veronica, a writer who’s working on a book about the humanitarian tragedy in Darfur; Lucas Caleb Rooney (the Globe’s recent “Death of a Salesman” and Broadway’s “The Country Girl”) is her husband, Michael, a wholesaler; Caitlin Muelder (“The Invention of Love” on Broadway) plays Annette, a self-styled financial manager; and T. Ryder Smith (a veteran of such Globe shows as “Lincolnesque” and “Cornelia” as well as “War Horse” on Broadway) plays her lawyer husband, Alan.

Smith, who was also seen in La Jolla Playhouse’s 2009 production of “Creditors,” says one fascination of Reza’s play for him been the way it works both as farce and as something deeper (and darker).

Before joining the production, he said, his main impression of the play was that it was “based in realistic behavior — a kind of naturalism, of recognizable, observed human behavior. That’s what I knew about it — it’s this farcical play that takes place in real time.

“But then you read it, and it’s not that at all. The play is beautifully smart, in that it works simultaneously on the levels of realism and symbolism — a symbolic poetic level.”

Noting that the play takes place in twilight, Smith says the “seed bed” he believes Reza has written from — the absurdist tradition of such dramatists as Beckett and Ionesco — leads “Carnage” to become “a much darker poetic parable for the literal twilight of our culture.”

What’s more, when the four characters try to come to some meeting of the minds, “the negotiation itself starts to replicate the violence it’s trying to resolve. That’s both terrifying and hilarious when you watch.

“It even becomes something epic — almost Greek at the end,” Smith adds, pointing to how the characters circle the central coffee table like predators (or prey). On some level, “they’re all the gods of carnage.”

A way with words

Beyond the broader meanings of “God of Carnage,” Seer says, “on a personal level, it’s an incredibly funny and hilarious farce. And that’s what’s clever about it: She’s telling us something and helping us understand a problem without lecturing us.”

The director also finds something delicious in the way Reza plays with language, and in the way the characters’ neediness and self-justification start to strip away at civility.

“The word usage in this play is very carefully done, and that’s where watching people negotiate with each other — observing how carefully people try to get what they want — is amusing and fun,” he says. “Human behavior, even at its most outrageous, (is something) I really enjoy. And that’s what I do for a living, is study that.

“It’s the kind of play that I knew I’d probably be asked to direct,” adds Seer, who has been serving at the Globe as interim artistic adviser while the theater engages in a nationwide search for an artistic director.

“I don’t think it’s because I’m so mean. But it’s the kind of funny that I understand, and like.”

A SHOWCASE FOR GLOBE/USD ALUMNI

With consistently high national rankings and a network of accomplished alumni, the Old Globe Theatre/University of San Diego graduate program has a reputation for turning out serious actors.

But is it true?

Depends what you mean by “serious.”

At a break in rehearsals for the Globe production of Yasmina Reza’s “God of Carnage,” three actors — all of them alumni of the joint MFA program — are turning an (alleged) interview into a comedy free-for-all.

The chief instigator is Lucas Caleb Rooney (class of 2002), who is ribbing Erika Rolfsrud (1996) and Caitlin Muelder (1999) about their relatively elderly status.

There is extended discussion about the familiar scents that greeted them upon returning to the rehearsal halls and performance spaces of their grad-school days. (One gets a special kind of grief from Rooney for admitting that even the aroma of the nearby zoo’s camels makes her sentimental.)

Then the actors — all of whom have appeared in other Globe productions since graduating — wrap things up with a heated argument over whether the place and the program should properly be thought of as Camelot or Oz.

Cue Rooney’s rapped version of the theme from “Camelot,” complete with San Diego-customized lyrics. Cue, too, his gloating over the quality of said rap.

“Crushed you guys!” he exults. “Analogy win!”

But if the tone of the discussion would give James Lipton a conniption, the idea that these three are arguing for either King Arthur’s enchanted lair or the home of the Emerald City gives a sense of the affection they feel toward the place.

“I wanted to go to grad school to get the ticket to the big leagues that they give out sometimes,” says Rooney in a (fleetingly) serious moment. “I wanted a vocational program where you learn by working with world-class theater artists. And that’s what I got. And it was pretty amazing.”

Far and wide

Rick Seer, who has directed the Globe/USD program for 19 years, says this is the first time in memory that so many alumni have appeared in a single Globe show.

But the program’s products are all over stages in the wider theater world — in New York and beyond. They include (most famously) Jim Parsons, the star of TV’s “The Big Bang Theory” who is now on Broadway in the latest revival of “Harvey.”

Meanwhile, current students are putting in an intense summer’s worth of work in the Globe’s annual Shakespeare Festival; all 14 MFA candidates take the theater’s outdoor stage for that rotation of three plays each year.

The program, launched by the Globe’s late founding director Craig Noel (and recently marking its 25th anniversary), admits only seven students a year, with an acceptance rate of less than 2 percent.

The reasons for the flood of applications aren’t hard to figure: All students are on full scholarship (at a cost of $90,000 for each student, says Seer); the Globe extends a stipend to each, because they’re not allowed to work.

“We never ask them to do anything but act,” says Seer.

Like the crosstown, La Jolla Playhouse-affiliated UC San Diego graduate theater and dance program (which offers multiple disciplines), Globe/USD regularly lands on lists of the top such programs in the country. (Seer says it’s regarded as the top classical acting program nationwide.)

Seer admits it “came as a rude shock that students from my program were old enough” to appear in “Carnage.” (The characters in the play are all close to 40.) “I have a family that never seems to get older. That’s how I feel a little bit as a teacher, because your students are forever young.”

But he says having actors who’ve been through common experiences and learned similar techniques in the classically centered program is a major boost when they return to the Globe.

“Just like starting any new job, an actor has to quickly respond to and talk to their boss,” Seer says. “We have to form those relationships and establish that trust very early, in a matter of days.

“(Here), you already have a shorthand — and most important, you already have a trust.”

Or, as Rolfsrud puts it: “We don’t have to have that glitch of a moment of, is he going to understand what I’m saying when I ask him this question? It’s like when you see somebody you haven’t seen in a long time, and you just pick right up. It’s that feeling with Rick.”

Muelder, meanwhile, says of the central focus on Shakespeare: “You know how if you play piano, every other instrument comes a little more easily? That’s how I felt about classical training. And that has paid off.”

Because of the program’s hands-on, vocational approach, says Rooney, “the one thing you know about people coming out of this program is they do know how to work. You can count on us to get the job done.”

Of course, Rooney can’t resist one more punch line: “(Now), it may not be the best job, but …” he says, trailing off with a laugh.